One of the advantages that the Internet provides to consumers is the ability to research specific products and find out information about those products before making a purchase. A popular venue for researching products is user reviews. Several studies have found that consumers go to online user reviews of products to not only help them research specific products but also to discover similar or related products of which the consumer was previously unaware.
User reviews generally include a short summary of a user's reason for purchasing (or not purchasing) a product. In some user reviews, the user lists the names of other products they considered before settling on the one they chose to purchase. Numerous online retailers, online magazines, and product review websites provide links next to featured products so users can describe their opinions about the product.
As useful as user reviews can be, there are still several drawbacks to the way they are currently implemented. First, current online user review pages are more or less “dead-ends”. In other words, current online user review pages do not provide any convenient mechanism for consumers reading a review to go to products mentioned by users in their review. This can make product discovery and research a tedious process.
In addition, consumers often do not have any information about the review writer to help them decide how knowledgeable the review writer is on the product being discussed. This means that a consumer has to rely almost exclusively on their own judgment as to the trustworthiness of a review writer.
Finally, writing an informative user review can be a tedious process and more time consuming than many users are willing to put up with. In fact, for many users the time and energy required to write a review is the main reason they do not write reviews.
The approaches described in the section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.